Best of: the top pandemic journalism
Journalists have grappled with an ever-changing industry and issues that hit closer than ever to them during the pandemic. Photo illustration by LUCA EVANS, Managing Editor
Mirin Fader, now a staff writer for The Ringer, was long used to jetting off to a different state or country every couple of weeks. It was part of the award-winning sports journalist’s job — flying wherever the story needed her to be.
But when COVID-19 hit the U.S. in March, Fader was stuck on the ground while writing a story for Bleacher Report on the lives of international athletes trapped abroad due to travel restrictions. She was stuck making incessant phone calls, a situation that foreshadowed the next year in the life of a journalist. Since then, Fader has been forced to exclusively conduct remote interviews.
“It’s really pushed me to have to double down on my reporting, be more specific with my questions and ask for more description,” Fader told The Panther May 12 in a voice memo. “Some things that I could observe in person, I can’t anymore.”
The pandemic, as well as the other historical ramifications it’s now inexorably linked to, has tested the very foundation of journalism. We’ve wrestled with determining what facts were accurate and worthy of dissemination amid the spread of COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We’ve debated objectivity in the context of reporting on police brutality and movements such as Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate.
Even with this journalism reckoning, and its significant job cuts, I am so thankful and proud to be wading into an industry that has demonstrated so much resilience during the pandemic. I’ve read some incredible work over the past year, and feel a strange sense of pride and connection to their authors despite having never met most of them.
Thus, for The Panther’s end-of-year issue, I want to highlight some of the best pandemic journalism I’ve seen. Included are three stories with brief descriptions and analyses, as well as the line or section I found most poignant.
Mirin Fader (Bleacher Report) — March 19, 2020
Best words: “She felt guilty that her translator, barely 100 pounds, had to push her 6'5", 200-pound frame around the hospital, her knees hanging out over the wheels like straws out of the top of a cup.”
Like so much of Fader’s work, this is a sports story that’s not really a sports story.
It’s about people with families, loved ones and lives they can’t reach back home in the U.S. — trapped abroad at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of them have Maltese poodles named Kaiden that they can’t take outside to walk, and some of them are germaphobes that sanitize their steering wheel every time they pump gas. They’re all connected by a very real, tangible fear that pervades throughout the piece. They also all happen to be overseas basketball players.
More than ever during the pandemic, Fader found that, for once, journalists and athletes were on equal footing in both dealing with this unprecedented situation, she said. Normally, there’s a sort of power imbalance. Players make millions of dollars; journalists generally don’t. Journalists have the power of the pen; players generally don’t. But Fader recalled truly bonding with the athletes she spoke with for the piece.
“Normally, it takes a really long time to develop intimacy with a subject, but when we were both going through this at the same time, that connection was made so much more quickly and easier,” Fader told The Panther in a voice memo. “The first question, ‘How are you?’ It would get a lot of serious response of (authenticity).”
“The sawmill nearly took the arm of a high school football player. Now the young man looks forward”
Hailey Branson-Potts (Los Angeles Times) — April 23, 2021
Best words: “He was standing in front of a rotating conveyor belt when a few pieces of wood got stuck. He grabbed one just as the machine grabbed it, too. He didn’t have time to let go. In an instant, the machine had his arm and was yanking him forward. He let out a scream.”
I will always and forever be a fan of feature writers who can take a finite subject or profile and find a story about something much bigger within that. This piece, written by Los Angeles Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts, had an instant hook: the gruesome story of a high school football player, Chase Kirby, who nearly lost his arm after he caught it in a local sawmill.
While Kirby’s story is the emotional vessel that engrosses the reader, the piece is really about his tiny town of Weaverville, California.
There’s plenty of moving parts that exist within this piece — Weaverville’s history, Kirby’s accident, high school football, the coronavirus and the sawmill — yet Branson-Potts beautifully ties them all together. Reflecting the stories of its residents, Weaverville’s history is one of endurance: the economy, sawmill and even football persevering despite the coronavirus. Kirby, his former football coach and his former high school counselor all share one thing in common: they’re survivors, through injury and pandemic.
One of the best compliments a story can receive, in my mind, is that it understands exactly what it’s about. This one does.
“Opinion | Black Journalists Are Exhausted”
Patrice Peck (The New York Times) — May 29, 2020
Best words: “I am pulled taut, straddling a time when the Black community could safely gather to celebrate, praise, commiserate, mourn, protest and uplift, or simply even just be, and I am pressed thin, experiencing déjà vu as time repeats itself like a broken record.”
I wanted to end this piece by including this opinion by a journalist on journalism. The aforementioned words from Peck have stuck in my mind ever since I read this piece a year ago.
In April 2020, recognizing the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus on Black communities, Peck started a newsletter focused on COVID-19 news for those same communities. Peck has experienced a certain push-and-pull effect during the pandemic, as the widespread Black Lives Matter movement has prompted both an acknowledgement of her voice on a far-reaching scale. However, it’s also lent itself to substantial stressors that can take a toll on Peck.
“It was the first time in my 10-plus years of having been a journalist that the things I had to say about what was happening in the Black community were actually being seen by people outside of the Black community,” Peck told The Panther.
Peck mentions in the piece that she left staff jobs to freelance because of the gatekeeping of white editors, also noting to me that it felt “very discouraging, frustrating and depressing” to constantly explain to authority figures why similar topics were important to publish. However, Peck’s words in this opinion prompted people from all over the world to reach out, including other Black journalists, she said.
“If a Black journalist isn’t going to write about it, it’s not going to get written about,” Peck told The Panther. “Who else is going to have that insight to know what we’re experiencing?”